For it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

In Andre's Platonov's The Foundation Pit the 'unknown last proletarian' (107) and last instance of 'residual exploited labour' (107) on the collective farm is a bear who hammers at the forge. In fact the forge is a 'shock' workshop and the bear is not only the last proletarian but also the first shock worker (udarniki). After been taken around the collective farm to denounce kulaks - in actuality, those who have mistreated him - the bear sees a banner 'For the Party, for Party loyalty, for the Shock Labor Forcing Open for the Proletariat the Doors into the Future!' (128).

Taking this injunction absolutely the bear begins to hammer out iron at a frantic rate, distressing the villagers as his labour threatens to ruin the iron (and therefore figuring the excess of 'shock work' that stormed to destructive attempts at production). The bear wants to force the door for a proletarian future 'expending all this furious, speechless joy into the zeal of labor' (128).

This is the interchange of animality and the status of the proletariat - the proletariat as animal and animal as proletariat (see Timofeeva). In Annie Epelboin's analysis, this is acceleration as destructive return to chaos:

'The bear symbolizes a prehistoric future .... He casts doubt on the validity of the creation myth itself. As an "unknown proletarian," representing the people as whole, and as a blacksmith, the bear is remiscent of the "hammerer-bear" of Siberian myth who, by inventing the forge, inaugurates cosmic and social order, presiding over the creation of the world. Platonov's bear, however, does not so much create the world as annihilate it. He is, at least potentially, the agent of ultimate destruction. Wanting to force open the doors of the future, he threatens to return the world to primordial chaos. Wanting to force the pace, to accelerate time, he shows us that time is reversible.'

The shock acceleration of labour in 'speechless joy' (jouissance?), reverses itself into a chaos that ruins any linearity. In the moment of the revolution, in the revolutionary negativity of the proletariat doubled with the animal, the revolution revolves and reverses.

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Many thanks to Daniel Spaulding for his rapid response to my paper 'Aesthetics of Communization'. I hope to reply on Monday, but there is probably more common ground that might at first appear.

There is no “aesthetics of communization.”
Indeed to claim as much suggests that the inquiry has been posed at the wrong
level, as if communization were a thing to which aesthetics might be attached –
a predicate added to a subject. Communization is not a subject; it is, rather,
a process that abolishes existing relations. The question then is whether a
process (moreover, a process that has never yet truly occurred) can in fact possess
an aesthetics. If we take “aesthetics” broadly to mean sensuous appearance,
then yes, communization will necessarily have its modes of appearance; there
will be movements of matter, form, affect, and so forth that will neither look
nor sound nor smell nor taste nor feel like the world mediated by capital. However,
if we take seriously communization theory’s basic contention that revolution in
the current phase of capitalism cannot proceed as the affirmation of an
existing position within class society, but only as a break with the
reproduction of the totality of capitalist relations, then there is today no
standpoint from which to elaborate a positive aesthetics adequate to communism.
From the perspective of communization we cannot possibly speak of an ascendant proletarian
art in the same way as we can speak of the historical ascendance of bourgeois
art, because communization takes the form of the immediate abolition of class
society rather than the affirmation and universalization of a class that might
possess its own particular representational structures.

Hence the “aesthetics of communization” can
only be designated as a placeholder for the forms that are, or will be, immanent
to the practice of negating existing forms of appearance (the real abstractions
of capitalist society). From our current standpoint there can be no
counter-aesthetics opposed to the commodity-form, for instance, but only an
aesthetics of the commodity-form’s contradictions and, perhaps, of the material
practice by which that form may eventually be abolished. The same goes for any
hypothetical counter-aesthetics of, say, free giving as opposed to exchange, or
of immediately social individuality as opposed to the reifications of gender.
To the extent that this is a positive aesthetics, however, it is not an “aesthetics
of communization” but rather something else, perhaps worth analyzing in its own
right (art in this guise may be the object of the disciplines of art history,
aesthetics properly speaking, and so forth, but not communization theory). On
the other hand, to the extent this aesthetics is only negative it is perhaps
not an aesthetics at all but a practice. Hence Benjamin Noys is quite right to point
to a double-bind: for communization, there is no aesthetics but in practice, but
if there is “aesthetics” there is no practice. To describe the “aesthetics of
communization” is to describe something that cannot exist except potentially
and in contradictory form, and that would also cease to exist if it were to be
realized, given that “art” as we know it is also a category of capitalist
society.

Unless I am mistaken, however, Noys is not
responding to an existing positive aesthetics of communization per se but is
rather attempting to describe, first of all, the aesthetics of communization theory, and second, the implications of
this body of theory for artistic practice.
Thus his critique is posed at the level of representation, as a meta-critique.
I believe this equivocation between practice and text explains many of the
paradoxes of his essay. Noys observes a contradiction between the “figures, tropes,
and forms” of the communization literature – namely, “immediacy, immanence, acceleration, and dispersion” – on the one hand, and the persistence of artistic
practice, on the other. He also superimposes this contradiction onto the
polarization within communization theory between groups that affirm the
possibility of elaborating “forms of life” in the present as opposed to those
who deny any prefigurative politics. The question he asks is: How is
communization theory able to reconcile its allegiance to purely negative
practice 1) with the continued existence of particularized artistic practice as
opposed to generic social practice, and 2) with its own existence during non-revolutionary
periods? I take his implication to be that communization theory does not reconcile these problems: it is a
contradictory formation. It therefore seems reasonable to interpret Noys as
offering preliminaries for a symptomatic reading of the structural contradictions
of communization discourse – of its political unconscious, perhaps. In the
process, however, “communization” comes to name a text rather than a practice.

It seems to me that Noys’s reading of
communization in terms of essentially literary categories misapprehends the
relation between theory, practice, and representation, at least at this historical
conjuncture and as elaborated in the communization texts under consideration. The
problem is that Noys can seem to collapse the temporality of theory with that
of the historical limit or horizon itself. (I should be clear that I am now
speaking primarily of communization theory in its non-voluntarist articulation;
Noys’s criticisms may indeed apply to certain ideas grouped under the label,
but the tactic of identifying a tension within “communization theory” already
presumes the field’s coherence – its difference, for example, from
insurrectionary anarchism – when this in fact remains to be argued.) Communization
theory may then be reduced to a fetishization of the utmost break, rather than a
reflection on the structure of the social totality that produces the break. Consequently the persistence of other things
besides revolution itself is taken as a problem for the theory rather than as an
element of what it in fact predicts. What yet remains to be done (communization)
is then identified as what is supposed to be happening now; what is supposed to
be happening then calls for an aesthetics (since aesthetics above all refers to
present appearances); what is now
happening in reality is then found inadequate to the (distorted) image of the
theory; and finally the “aesthetic” element is found to be contradictory due to
the collapse of one temporality into the other. Such a perspective ultimately attributes
communization theory to a normative or utopian standpoint as opposed to recognizing
the theory as conditioned by possibilities immanent to processes that are
already occurring but which do not yet constitute a revolutionary situation.

To ward off this line of reasoning it is
necessary to insist on the uneven temporality of present struggles. While it is
possible to say that accumulation of surplus capital alongside surplus labor,
the weakening of the wage as the dominant form of social mediation, the
destruction of unions and the left, and so on, increasingly point to
communization as the logic of proletarian struggle in the present moment, it
would clearly be absurd to claim that none of the elements of the
“programmatist” era survive into the post-1960s period. Nor are these forms
present merely as archaisms, to be swept away before the millenarian revolution: they are exactly what remain to
be overcome in struggle. The reading of communization theory as
“accelerationist” in a pejorative sense may then result from eliding structural
analysis of a revolutionary sequence possible (but by no means certain to
transpire) under current or imminent conditions with the literal time of the
present. The fact that many texts in this corpus argue that communization must
be rapid and contagious is strictly speaking another issue; these texts do not
necessarily argue that the “prairie fire” will break out tomorrow, nor that it
will escape being extinguished, but rather suggest what will be necessary for the reproduction of non-capitalist life. A
critique of this particular aspect of communization theory would have to be offered
in terms of the feasibility of other strategies in a given (if hypothetical)
revolutionary conjuncture, rather than lodged against an undifferentiated
“accelerationism.”

What remains, now, is to draw conclusions for
current practice – both political and artistic, though it is the latter that
concerns us at the moment. Let me repeat that there is no aesthetics of
communization. This is not, however, to say that we cannot “make it with
communization.” Even for an analysis that accepts the thesis of real
subsumption, the totality of capitalism remains contradictory: indeed this
analysis, as opposed to the pessimistic conclusions of Debord and the later
Frankfurt School, has no greater purpose than to indicate that the dialectic of
capital’s expansion leads to the destruction of its own conditions of
reproduction. Hence the ruptures from which a practice may be elaborated are
not positive/normative positions external to capitalism but are rather immanent
to capitalism’s structure as the “moving contradiction.” In turn, the appeal to
a “beneath” of the state of things that Noys questions as a form of “lurking
vitalism” does not necessarily call forth an ontology of capture and escape, but
rather indicates that the forms of appearance presented as true in capitalism
are in fact only one side of a contradiction. The point here is not that real
abstraction is mere illusion – to be dispelled, perhaps, with the aid of art –
but rather that each instance of abstraction (value, abstract labor) has as its
reverse an instance of the concrete or particular (use-value, concrete labor).
These instances of the particular are subsumed to the totality but are nonetheless
in contradiction with it. Indeed both
the general and the particular as they exist for us are within capitalism;
communization is not the affirmation of one pole (use-value, concrete labor) at
the expense of the other but the abolition of both, and hence also of the
totality. The persistence of contradictory forms is then simply the material
with which art has to do today. If art has a function in anticapitalist
practice it may now be to hold open the non-identity or gap at the heart of the
capitalist value-form, not so much as a defensive maneuver against the
universality of bad life, but rather as a material practice conditioned by the
real movement of negation.

Sunday, 12 May 2013

Communization
is a theory of revolution primarily developed out of the French ultra-left
during the mid-1970s. It poses the necessity for revolution as the immediate
process of communist measures – communization – without transition. Here I want
to talk about the aesthetics of communization in two senses. The first is to
probe the kinds of aesthetic figures, tropes, and forms that communization
theory uses to construct its own particular ‘problematic’. This is not, to be
clear, to dismiss communization as ‘merely’ an aesthetic politics. Instead it
is a way to grasp the form of communization, including the diversity of those
forms. There are, as we will see, different communizations and different ways
of posing the problem of communization. One way to grasp this plurality is to
trace different aesthetic emphases and choices in the deployment and use of the
key figures and tropes of communization. The second sense of the aesthetics of
communization I will explore concerns the implications of communization theory
for aesthetics and the contemporary practice of art. What would art after
communization look (or sound, or read) like? Again, consideration of this sense
will bring out tensions and differences in the forms of communization. Can we
practice a communizing art? Is art impossible in the horizon of capital? If
that’s the case can we practice the impossibility of art?

Figures of
Communisation

The
refiguration of communism as communization suggests the centrality of the
figure of activity and process. ‘Communism’ is, precisely, an
‘ism’, a suffix forming the name of a system or school of thought, while
‘ization’ is a suffix denoting the act, process, or result of doing something.
This activity or process is one that is apparently tautological: communization
is the production of communism by communization: ‘[T]he communist production of communism’ (Anon 2011: 6); or ‘Communisation
is not the struggle for communism; it
is communism that constitutes itself
against capital.’ (B.L. 2011: 148). There are no non-communist ways to
communism; hence communization is communism is communization. We make communism
by making communism. If this is the conditioning trope, I want to explore the
tautological process of communization in the linked figures of immediacy, immanence, acceleration,
and dispersion. In terms of their
destination in a common fluidity it will be no surprise that we find these
figures merging and flowing into each other.

The activity or process of
communization is also immediate. While a process or activity suggests something
which takes time, the time that communization takes can only be the immediate production of communist
relations: ‘The revolution is communisation; communism is not its project or
result.’ (Anon 2011: 6) There is no figure or problem of transition from
capitalism to communism via socialism or, if we are more sceptical, we could
say that transition is displaced or refused. So, there is no transition to a
new communist state, but rather ‘the simultaneous disappearance of the social
classes’ (de Mattis 2011: 24). If there is no need to build or make communism,
then why is communization an activity? It is an immediate activity in the
process of revolution itself, which refuses any non-communist measures (such as
the seizure of the state, the retention of money, maintaining armies or other
capitalist institutions, etc.). The qualitative leap to revolution (Hic Rhodus, hic Salta!) is the leap into
communization.

This immediacy is linked with the
trope of acceleration (which I will discuss separately later): ‘The revolution
will be both geographic and without fronts: the starting points of
communisation will always be local and undergo immediate and very rapid
expansion, like the start of a fire.’ (B.L. 2011: 154; my italics) It used to
be a ‘single spark’ that would start a ‘prairie fire’ and we don’t seem so far
from this Maoist figure, except we now have the refusal of any slowing down in
this incendiary process.

Of course the deferred question is when does this immediate process begin,
or has it already begun? Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, who make
occasional use of the term (there are some brief mentions of communization in This is Not a Program (2011: 68), and at
greater length in the Call), imply
that communization has begun now with forms-of-life and communes that escape the
net(work) of imperial capital. On the other hand, Theorié Communiste (TC)
insist that it can only begin in the revolution and hence all that we can have
is a negative prefiguration of the limits of capitalism and glimpses of this
future moment. This also suggests how activity and immediacy interact: our
activity is making communism immediately, but this can’t be done simply
immediately. It will take time: either the time of struggles from now into
communism, or the time of the revolution itself as we hit the limits of
capitalism.

If the temporal figure is immediate we
might say the ‘spatial’ figuration is immanence.
We are drowning is the waters of capitalism and the advice, as in Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), is not to struggle out
of the water, which is to drown for sure, but to immerse in the destructive element. There is no outside, no
cobblestones beneath the beach; we are subsumed by capitalist social relations
horizontally, across the planet, and vertically, down into the very
building-blocks of life. In Gilles Dauvé’s amusing characterization TC are
accused of producing a ‘proletarian structuralism’ (Dauvé 2008: 93), in which
capitalism dominates all. This characterization of immanence carries different
inflections: from the extreme position of TC – in which capitalism is totality,
but contradictory totality – to Tiqqun’s emphasis on forms-of-life that can
traverse capitalism on its own ground, or to Dauvé and Nesic’s assertion of
invariant communist struggle.

It is at these points of the
inscription of struggle that we encounter the figure of acceleration. We have
already seen how immediacy is linked to acceleration: ‘communisation will
always be local and undergo immediate
and very rapid expansion, like the
start of a fire.’ The dominance of capitalism at all points implies the acceleration
of struggle at all points: ‘[E]verything depends on the struggle against
capital, which either deepens and extends itself or loses pace and perishes quickly.’ (B.L. 2011: 148; my italics) If
‘the movement [of communisation] decelerates’ (B.L. 2011: 150), then we fall
back from communisation and into socialisation (a more ‘traditional’ process of
the socialisation of the means of production). To force the immediate
production of communization requires the speed to outpace the forces of
reaction, which are seen as implanted largely within the process of revolution
(another contention that could be debated[1]).

This acceleration also relies on a
dispersion of points of struggle, thanks to the loss of compactness of the
proletarian condition. The end of what TC call ‘programmatism’ – the
traditional forms of workers’ identity, affirmed in unions, parties, and states
– produces a dispersion of the proletarian condition. Rather than dispersion
indicating a weakening of energies, instead it is taken by communization as
suggesting a pluralisation that requires no condenser (to borrow from Trotsky’s
image of the party as piston and the proletariat as steam). These dispersed
energies recompose, for TC, a new figure of the proletariat without party and
formal organization. For Tiqqun they indicate a pluralisation of the struggles
of forms-of-life which don’t simply cohere into the ‘proletarian’ as
classically conceived.

These are all figures of fluidity: ‘Human activity as a flux is the only
presupposition of its collective, that is to say individual, pursuit.’
(B.L. 2011: 152) This fluidity predicates on constant expansion: ‘communisation
can only exist in a dynamic of endless enlargement.’ (de Mattis 2011: 25) This
figural context, in which prefiguration lies unstably on either side, both
here-and-now and in the process of revolution, seems to me the tension
communization bequeaths to contemporary practice, and contemporary artistic
practice. Do we have simply a negative prefiguration, which I’ll discuss
shortly, or can something emerge that indicates a possible future?

The End of
Programmatism

In
terms of our second sense of the aesthetics of communization – what are the
implications of communisation for the practice of art today? – I want to
suggest we can draw on the notion of the end of programmatism proposed by TC,
and the general agreement by communizers of all stripes that ‘traditional’
forms of workers’ organization are finished or empty. If we take the parallel
Alain Badiou (2007) draws between the political avant-garde of the Leninist
Party and the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s in The Century, we could suggest that both forms have been
hollowed-out. The end of programmatism is also, we could say, the end of the
programme of the avant-garde – attached to small groups, privileged artists,
the manifesto, etc. Badiou, elsewhere, concludes on the need for a post-party
politics, and so we could also suggest a ‘post-avant-garde art’. Of course,
declaration of the death of the avant-garde and calls for reinvention of the
avant-garde are commonplace to the point of banality; even the proposals of ‘relational’
or ‘post-production’ art by Nicholas Bourriaud, borrow this trope. What kind of
precision, if any, can communization bring to this situation?

One way to answer this question is to
consider the reflections of TC on the ‘avant-garde’ practice of the
Situationists. Guy Debord, de facto ‘leader’ of the SI, was acutely conscious
of the finitude of the avant-garde. In his last film In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni (1978) Debord stated that:
‘Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is
to have enlivened their time without outliving it.’ (2003: 182) Although
they display this awareness TC argue that the SI remains in an equivocal
position on the cusp of the end of programmatism, both artistically and
politically. On the one hand, they are able to trace out the end of art and the
end of work, the impossibility of proceeding in terms set even by an ultra-left
programme. On the other hand, they have nothing to replace this programme with
and so fall back on nostalgia or practices which invoke the old models they
have ruled out.

While the SI aimed at a dialectical
supersession of art through its suppression and realization in revolutionary
practice they tended to remain split between the aesthetic, with most artists
expelled in 1962, on the one hand, and the political termination of art, on the
other, with art returning in nostalgia for past adventures and possibilities. In
the first aesthetic moment the ‘constructed situations’ of the early SI presage
revolution in the forms of enclaves or moments within the reign of the spectacle. They are affirmative
counter-possibilities, and this belief in a counter-art remains close to the
belief in an affirmative proletarian identity found in council communism by the
SI. The aesthetic SI continues to make art as they continue to make revolution.

For Roland Simon it is the penetration
of real subsumption – the dominance of capitalism that reworks the production
process to capitalist ends – that signals the end of this possibility, along
with the end of an alternative ‘working class’ identity; any such ‘moments’ or
artworks cannot be realized under the dominance of capital. In contrast,
following through on the rigorous negativity of revolution, Simon (2009) argues
that the suppression of art and the ‘politicization’ of the SI indicates a
recognition that ‘art’ can only take place within the revolutionary process –
within communization. Therefore, ‘constructed situations’ might better describe
the process of revolution – qua communization
– than the pre-revolutionary and prefigurative process of ‘triggering’
revolution.

The rigorously negative formulation
keeps dropping back into ambiguous gestures in the case of the SI. The
so-called ‘pessimism’ of the later Debord can be seen as a sign of the
difficulty in holding to this rigorous negative gesture and overcoming the
desire for a ‘positive’ form of art now. This can be seen in his tendency to
project back a nostalgic perception of the possibilities of the past that have
become ‘lost’ in the present; whether a lost Paris, lost comrades, or the
decline of the quality of alcohol, moments of the aesthetic recede into the
past. Debord remains within, to use Marx’s words, ‘world-historical necromancy’
rather than the ‘poetry of the future’.

Burning Down the
Gallery

The
communizing position implies that with the evacuation of ‘proletarian identity’
and the ‘avant-garde’, and the
evacuation of the potential fusion of both in some ‘passion for the real’, we must
abandon any aestheticizing model of revolution and any aesthetic prefiguration
of revolution. In these terms the ‘positive’ vision of the SI as regards
aesthetics is not merely outdated but, strictly speaking, impossible. This bears some resemblance to the thesis of the ‘death
of the avant-gardes’, but it does not imply a welcoming of this death as the
opportunity for some new modes of practice or reinvention – from the relational
to the reconfigurative, we might say. Instead, the TC critique implies, I
think, the futility and necessary nullity of any affirmative revolutionary art.
All that we can have is the rift that exists at the limit.

In the case of workers’ struggles this
rift is indicated in suicidal struggles which register the limit that class
identity forms. The result is the burning down of factories, attempts to claim
as high a redundancy payment as possible, and other ‘exits’ from work (R.S.
2011: 119). Crashing against the limit that capitalism itself can no longer
sustain the worker’s identity, the tragedy and possibility of struggle today
lies in a rift from this identity and the confrontation with class as an
exteriority. In this moment there can be a fleeting ‘de-essentialization’ of
labour, and it is this negative moment that is prefigurative of a communizing
process (R.S. 2011: 120). If I risk transferring these terms into art, we could
say the identity of the avant-garde is the limit. Today, to continue to be an
artist is the problem, an unsustainable identity. The rift would lie here with
the ‘de-essentialization’ of art, posed as a limit we can no longer practice.

To take one, controversial, example we
could say that this situation is already implicit in the practice of Andy
Warhol. On the one hand, his work belongs to the moment of programmatism, with
the discourse of the ‘Factory’ and the proliferating model of industrial and
media proliferation and production. This renewed and estranged discourse of
alienated labour is doubled by the nihilism that inhabits the practice of art
as impossible. In his essay ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, from 1970, Foucault
registers this equivocally subversive function:

This
is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his
series of advertising smiles: the oral and nutritional equivalence of those
half-open lips, teeth, tomato sauce, that hygiene based on detergents; the
equivalence of death in the cavity of an evis­cerated car, at the top of a
telephone pole and at the end of a wire, and between the glistening, steel blue
arms of the electric chair. ‘It’s the same either way,’ stupidity says, while
sinking into itself and infi­nitely extending its nature with the things it says
of itself; ‘Here or there, it’s always the same thing; what difference if the
colors vary, if they’re darker or lighter. It’s all so senseless-life, women,
death! How stupid this stupidity!’ But, in concentrating on this boundless
monotony, we find the sudden illumination of multiplicity itself – with nothing
at its center, at its highest point, or beyond it – a flickering of light that
travels even faster than the eyes and successively lights up the moving labels
and the captive snapshots that refer to each other to eternity, without ever
saying anything: suddenly, arising from the background of the old inertia of
equivalences, the zebra stripe of the event tears through the darkness, and the
eternal phantasm informs that soup can, that singular and depthless face.

Warhol’s
stupidity registers the moment of exhaustion of the programme in advance and
from within – a hollowing-out that would emerge in the 1970s and 1980s.

This ‘prefigurative’ negativity of the
earlier ‘avant-garde’, or artists of the period of programmatism, seems to
imply an odd temporality. Why should such negative gestures come in advance of
the moment of the end of programmatism? Why should the most resonant artistic
experiments in regard to communization (The Artists Placement Group, Duchamp,
Warhol, etc.) come at the ‘wrong time’? We could hazard an
interpretation from within the communzing problematic. While these ruptures
with the regime of art and the artistic are chosen
gestures, the end of programmatism might be said to make them necessary. If the end of art was an act,
such as Duchamp’s giving-up of art for chess (equivocal as that was), now the
artist faces the necessity of such gestures as they cannot self-reproduce as an
artist. This does not, however, explain why all or most art of the present
moment doesn’t seem to take this ‘negative’ form. In fact, as we will see, the
present moment seems more dominated by the desire to turn the negative into new
forms of ‘positivity’ – most notably new ‘objects’ and new ‘materialities’.

The emptying out of art, in its truly
negative form, is, however, also registered by another strand of contemporary communization, which is pursued by
the post-Tiqqun milieu. In ‘A Fine Hell’ (2013), ‘build the party’ argue that:
‘Aesthetics, therefore, is imperial neutralization, whenever direct recourse to the police is not
possible.’ They unequivocally condemn aesthetics as originating as a
counter-revolutionary strategy in Schiller, and they have no time for any
‘artistic communism’ out of the early Marx or the ‘Oldest Programme of German
Idealism’. Instead aesthetics is synonymous with the aesthetic regime of
Empire, with the aesthetic performing an ‘infernal synthesis’ on any
antagonism. In common with their Agambenian roots, they regard aesthetics as a
house to be burned down (Man without
Content 115); or, in the case of Claire Fontaine, an art gallery to be
burned down.

The alternative to the aesthetic is
‘the materialist obviousness of
forms-of-life.’ The only art is the art of inhabiting our determinations rather
than trying to escape them. In this traversal we must practice ‘an
apprenticeship in the art of tying
and unbinding.’ Art is impossible. Installation art can only make ‘little
portable hell[s]’. Instead we have an (anti-) political practice that considers
art as technique to form and find the dispersion or chaos of forms-of-life.
This is a collective elaboration, a sharing or force they call ‘communism’.
Here art seems to coincide with political practice as an unworking of the
various imperial identities, including the identity of the artist.

Of course these are, more or less,
rigorously negative programmes. The difficulty, which seems to me to afflict
communization generally, is the uncomfortable tracing of limits and rifts.
These rifts are at once prefigurative, but also not. In the case of TC the only
prefiguration is negative. The crashing into the limit of class identity is all
there is, and so the artist could only crash into the identity of ‘artist’ as
well. For Tiqqun and others there is something of a traversal within these
determinations that promises a reformulation of forms-of-life. This vitalist
interpretation suggests an excess encrypted within and against (this is the
modelling of communization recently proposed by Stephen Zepke).

Expressive Negations

What
does this clarify about our situation? To return to the story of the SI one of
the ironies is that this story is often told today as an aesthetic story. Communization suggests the necessary termination
of this story, so why should it persist? Why, to use a phrase of Johanna
Isaacson (2011), do we think the legacy of the SI has been thought in terms of
‘lineages of expressive negation’? That is to say, the SI has tended to be
mined for aesthetic gestures of negation that would somehow express, here and
now, precisely a sense of revolutionary possibility. An exhaustive account
would be beyond the limits of time and patience. What I would suggest is that
these ‘the lineages of expressive negation’ have dominated many of the
receptions of the SI: from Greil Marcus’s Lipstick
Traces (1989), with its lineage of negation from the SI to punk, to
McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the
Street (2011), with its recovery of the ‘artistic SI’, the tendency has
gone precisely in the other direction to that indicated by communization.

The difficulty then remains: how do we
account for the ‘error’ of these readings? If Debord and the SI couldn’t hold
on to a negative reading and persisted in nostalgia, we might say the limit of
reading today turns the SI itself into an object of nostalgia. Marx’s ‘poetry
of the future’ seems as distant as ever. We could argue that this is one sign
of the current limit of class identity and the blockage which forces us back
into nostalgia for ‘expressive negation’ at a moment that is, to say the least,
unconducive to such forms. The additional irony is that such ‘negations’ are
often justified and retained precisely because of their positive forms. It is the fact that they seem existent
possibilities, rather the austere path of the resolutely negative, that lends
them a certain heft in the ‘weightless’ experience of capitalism. I would
suggest that it is precisely the paradoxical ‘positivity’ of these ‘expressive
negations’ that exerts attraction and fascination in the present moment. In
this way, and here I have some sympathy with the communizing critique, the risk
is of a consolatory function of the
aesthetic.

Making it with
Communization

Can
we then make anything out of communization? In a response to a questionnaire on
Occupy sent by the journal October,
Jaleh Mansoor, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel Spaulding argue that: ‘Art’s
usefulness in these times is a matter less of its prefiguring a coming order,
or even negating the present one, than of its openness to the materiality of
our social existence and the means of proving for it.’ (2012: 48) This is a
useful attempt to flesh out what art might do within the context of communization
that suggests the absence of affirmative practice. Here it is a matter of the
‘materials’ we have to work with (and against), rather than some kind of
guaranteed practice.

They go on to unpack this statement to
argue that art registers the falsity of the capitalist universe and insist that
bodies and things cannot be captured. The difficulty for me here is the
modelling of capitalism as capture and the evasion of capital as totality. This
‘beneath’ the state of things, their metaphor, seems in danger of returning to
the problematic metaphor of ‘beneath the cobblestones, the beach’. There is a
tension of lurking vitalism, I find, which seems to fall away from the probing
of art and labour, including the failure of labour.[2]
Perhaps this vitalism emerges from the very rigour of the negative, as its
flipside and ‘affirmative’ moment. This returns us to the tensions and problems
of the SI and suggests that the ‘end of programmatism’ or the cusp of that
‘end’, remains less clear cut than we might imagine.

I say this not to assert superiority,
but rather to assess the difficult problematic communization poses to us. The
rigour of its negative formulations leave us in what may seem the
unsatisfactory position of merely exploring negative prefigurations: limits,
ruptures, suicidal activities, identifications with capital, and aesthetic
regressions. Of course working with negativity is one of the definitional
traits of the avant-garde, so this is not so unfamiliar. That said, and in
perhaps ironically Wittgensteinian fashion, I’d say the problematic of
communization might be useful as a kind of therapy for our prefigurative and
ruptural desires. Therapy is, or should be, painful; in Freud’s famous
formulation we hope to pass from hysterical misery to everyday unhappiness. In
the context of communization we could rework this to suggest moving from an
oscillation of hysterical misery and elation to everyday misery. That’s to say,
to begin from where we are.